WebSchemas/SKOS

This is an archived WebSchemas proposal SKOS for schema.org. See Proposals listing for more. Note: active schema.org development is now based at github

Overview

Collaborative work to enrich Schema.org with support for controlled vocabularies web publication with a SKOS description of concepts and schemes.

There has been two major discussion threads on adopting SKOS in schema.org: Schema.org for glossary, controled vocabulary, thesaurus... publication - which class to use ? in early 2012 and the more recent and longer Should we adopt SKOS? (early 2013). Both threads are in favor of seeing schema.org adopt a SKOS-like set of terms.

Update 2014-06-22: MiniSKOS updated test build ConceptCode, schema
Update 2013-11-19: MiniSKOS proposal circulated. Summary: add Topic, an equivalentClass to skos:Concept, and relate schema properties to it.

Proposals

Jean Delahousse posted a proposal on January 10 2013, which was exported (by Stéphane Corlosquet) from original Word .docx: File:Skos-schema.org-v1.pdf. This proposal has been reviewed by Antoine Isaac and Romain Wenz.
- HTML+RDFa+RDFS document listing all the additions of types and properties to schema.org
- Mapping table:

Schema.org	SKOS	SKOS label	SKOS definition
name	prefLabel	preferred label	The preferred lexical label for a resource, in a given language
inEnumeration	inScheme	is in scheme	A concept may be a member of more than one concept scheme
Enumeration	ConceptScheme

Discuss

We propose to introduce a new sub-class of Intangible : Concept, mapped with skos:Concept. The class Enumeration is considered as equivalent to skos:ConceptScheme. We propose to add a property to Enumeration : hasTopConcept.

Open questions:

Should we keep Concept a subclass of Intangible? There is an implicit disjunction between Intangible and other “tangible” classes (Person, CreativeWork, etc). This could raise issues with the fact that SKOS does not endorse such a disjointness (http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/#seccombining). It is not very clean conceptually, sure, but some case may welcome the possibility to have a resource typed both as a Person and a Concept.
Should we keep ConceptScheme as equivalent to Enumeration, following the practices hinted at http://blog.schema.org/2012/05/schemaorg-markup-for-external-lists.html and http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/ExternalEnumerations , or should we create an new sub-class to put the emphasis on a new type of resources?

Examples

Example of schema.org/Concept that references external Concepts in the context of an article in RDFa:

<div vocab="http://schema.org/" typeof="Article">
  <div property="name">Roger Federer reaches the Wimbledon final</div>
  <div property="body">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.</div>
  <div> Tags:
    <a property="about" typeof="Concept" href="http://data.nytimes.com/N15335442980672796250">
      <span property="name">Wimbledon Tennis Tournament</span></a>,
    <a property="about" typeof="Concept" href="http://data.nytimes.com/73418278779906874903">
      <span property="name">Roger Federer</span></a>,
    <a property="about" typeof="Concept" href="http://data.nytimes.com/48656846912834600960">
      <span property="name">Tennis</span></a>.
</div>

Use cases

Todo: list people / organizations who are supporting this proposal.